1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to digital wireless communications systems in which delays of individual multipath components of a time-varying fading channel must be provided, such as, for example, systems using RAKE receivers in Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) systems. The present invention is particularly suitable for receivers that operate in fading environments and have limited processing resources (e.g., receivers in Wideband (WCDMA) terminals), but is not limited to such receivers.
2. History of Related Art
In wireless communication systems, a physical channel between a transmitter and a receiver is formed by a radio link. In most cases, a transmit antenna is not narrowly focused towards the receiver and, in addition to a possible direct path, many other propagation paths often exist between the receiver and the transmitter. The other propagation paths are typically caused by reflections from objects in the surroundings. Rays with similar propagation distances combine at the receiver depending on an instantaneous phase relationship and form a distinct multipath component. An effect of the combining depends on the instantaneous relationship of the carrier wavelength and distance differences and, in the case of destructive interference, often leads to a significant path-gain magnitude decrease (i.e., fading).
Performance of the receiver may be improved by utilizing signal energy carried by many multipath components. The performance improvement is achieved using a RAKE receiver in which each multipath component is assigned a despreader whose reference copy of a spreading code is delayed equally to a path delay of a corresponding multipath component. Outputs of the despreaders (i.e., RAKE fingers) are coherently combined to produce a symbol estimate. The RAKE receiver requires knowledge of the multipath delays and the values of the channel impulse response for all paths.
To achieve an optimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a RAKE receiver combiner output, the signal energy from as many physical paths as possible should be collected. In addition, tracking as many different physical paths as possible (i.e., higher utilized diversity) significantly increases the robustness of reception, since the probability of a simultaneous deep fade of all tracked paths is reduced. Simultaneous deep fade is a phenomenon that can lead to significant signal block-error-rate (BLER) degradation.
CDMA requires soft handoff (SHO) at cell boundaries. During SHO, a receiver receives signals from multiple cells simultaneously until the SHO is completed. The RAKE receiver coherently combines the received signals to increase a received-signal energy and to improve a post-combining SNR. The signal path delays from all the cells are intended to be estimated. Following the signal-path-delay estimation, as many signal paths as possible are used for demodulation.